Friday, March 6, 2009

Last night I couldn't sleep so I pick up an old favorite: Woody Allen's Getting Even. It's one of my favorite books of short stories. Anyways, I reread Mr. Big; an over-the-top detective styled story with all the trappings of a Philosophy 101 class. It seemed particularly relevant as Allen takes a swipe at logical positivists!

Here's a taste:

"Well, she's lying. She's a teacher at Radcliffe. She was mixed up with a philosopher for a while." "Pantheist?" "No. Empiricist, as I remember. Bad guy. Completely rejected Hegel or any dialectical methodology." "One of those." "Yeah. He used to be a drummer with a jazz trio. Then he got hooked on Logical Positivism. When that didn't work, he tried Pragmatism. Last I heard he stole a lot of money to take a course in Schopenhauer at Columbia. The mob would like to find him - or get their hands on his textbooks so they can resell them." "Take it from me, Kaiser. There's no one out there. It's a void. I couldn't pass all those bad checks or screw society the way I do if for one second I was able to recognize any authentic sense of Being. The universe is strictly phenomenological. Nothing's eternal. It's all meaningless."